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ABOUT Culture and Cognition
Overview
All thinking occurs in individual minds; but all individual minds deploy in richly structured contexts - communities, regions, ethnicities, cultures, nation-states, etcetera. Hence understanding thought requires description at both the psychological and cultural levels, and of how phenomena at the two levels interact.
The Culture and Cognition Program is a collaboration between the University of Michigan’s Psychology and Anthropology departments and the Institute for Social Research. Faculty and students from anthropology, psychology, and related disciplines are brought together for discussion, collaboration, and graduate student training.
During the winter semester, the program hosts a visiting speaker series. Past series have been on topics such as culture and cognition across species and literary theory and cognition. The series culminates in a day-long conference hosted by the program’s students. The Winter of 2004 series was on emotion and cognition.
Major areas of interest in the program include: cross-cultural differences in reasoning, perception, and memory; culture and emotion; evolution and culture; domain-specific/modular approaches to cognitive architecture; culture and development; the epidemiology of representations.
Training Goals
- Students acquire a comprehensive knowledge of theory and methods relevant to interactions between cultural phenomena and higher-level psychological phenomena. Students develop skills needed to combine anthropological and psychological approaches in a curriculum that demands significant training in psychology and anthropology.
- Students explore ways in which universal higher-level psychological processes, in interaction with complex environments, give rise to the distinct patterns of cultural experience and determine their distribution over time and space.
- Students develop research skills using and combining the theory and methods of interpretive disciplines with those of the behavioral sciences.
Affiliated Program
- MSc in Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology
- What makes us human? What makes culture possible? The University of Oxford's new Institute for Cognitive & Evolutionary Anthropology announces a new 12 month MSc degree to commence in October 2007 (subject to institutional approval). This program in "Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology" explores human thought, behaviour, and culture from the perspectives of the evolutionary and cognitive sciences. Degree candidates will read in primate behavioral ecology, human evolution (with a behavioral ecology emphasis), mind and culture, and quantitative methods in the human sciences; and complete a supervised 10,000 word dissertation. Program staff includes Professor Robin Dunbar, Professor Harvey Whitehouse, and Dr. Justin Barrett. Additional information about the course and how to apply is available at: MSc. Applications for the 2007-2008 year will be accepted until July 26, 2007. (This course is offered subject to institutional approval.)
- DPhil in Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology
- How can cognitive or evolutionary insights help explain patterns in cultural expression? The University of Oxford's new Institute for Cognitive & Evolutionary Anthropology announces a new 3 year DPhil degree to commence in October 2007. This research program offers the opportunity to explore human thought, behaviour, and culture from the perspectives of the evolutionary and cognitive sciences. Those who already have an appropriate graduate degree in a related area ( e.g., experimental psychology, anthropology, evolution) may apply as Probationer Research Students (PRS) in the first instance; they may nonetheless subsequently be advised that one of the master's degrees may be more suitable for them to start with. Program staff includes Professor Robin Dunbar, Professor Harvey Whitehouse, and Dr. Justin Barrett. Additional information about the course and how to apply is available at: DPhil. Applications for the 2007-2008 year will be accepted until July 26, 2007. (This course is offered subject to institutional approval.)
Past Syllabi
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